It was Piers Gaveston who bore the King’s crown, while Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster, who had expected to do so, had to walk behind him bearing the Sword of Mercy. The Princes of France, arrayed like a field of golden lilies, would never forgive the slight of sartorial eclipse. The barons’ hands were never far from their swords, and Isabel, watching them anxiously from behind her illuminated missal, felt sure that but for her presence and the holiness of the place, Piers Gaveston would never have come out of the Abbey alive.
And in spite of all his carefully-thought-out plans everything seemed to go wrong that day. Carpenters, officials and cooks might well have been bribed to clumsy inefficiency by their betters, or — more likely still — might have agreed among themselves with grim Cockney humour to do everything possible to descredit the hated favourite.
Accidents which normally might have been accepted with good humour were all blamed upon Gaveston. It was true enough, what Edward had said, that all of them were looking for insults because they were consumed by jealousy. But it was not until long afterwards that Isabel and some of the more tolerant among them came to realize this. At the time the annoyances which excited their anger seemed too flagrant to be borne. And a final blight was cast over the whole unpropitious day by the news that a highly esteemed knight, Sir John Bakewell, while helping a fainting lady from the Abbey, had been heartlessly trodden underfoot by the ill-controlled crowd, and crushed to death.
After the Coronation life could have been pleasant at Westminster, but Isabel’s relations prepared to sail home in dudgeon and most of her husband’s barons could scarcely wait for the opening of the promised Parliament when they would have a chance to voice their long-repressed grievances.
Chapter Five
“You cantered well, Madam, in spite of the slippery mud along the Strand,” encouraged the Queen’s Master-of-Horse. “A little straighter in the saddle and you will have all our English ladies envious.”
“You flatter me, Sir Robert,” laughed Isabel, pulling up breathlessly. “You know very well that though I might plague you to instruct me from now till Doomsday I should never be half as good a horsewoman as your May Queen.”
“She has far more experience. She rode everywhere with the late King.”
“And now goes hunting with the present one. That is what I want to do.”
“But only the other evening, when you were learning one of our card games from the Lady Alicia Bigod, you said that you detested hunting.”
“How you do remember every small, foolish thing I say! And even if I did say it, are there not sometimes reasons why one should make oneself do even those things which are detested most?”
“You are anxious to improve your riding only because you think it will please the King if you go hunting,” said Robert le Messager, staring glumly between his horse’s ears because he had entertained a wild hope that it might have been an excuse to enjoy his own company.
“He will be lonely if the Earl of Cornwall goes,” said Isabel softly.
Her companion did not answer, and presently she called to him to stop. It was one of those mornings of early spring which stir undefined longings and whisper of immortality. From London to Westminster the Thames curved beside them, her golden rushes rustling in the shallows. Soft willow catkins delicately fringed the banks, and here and there against a cottage wall a lilac bush was tipped with hopeful green. Before them, stately against a pale blue sky, rose Palace roofs and Abbey towers. “Let us look at the Chere Reine cross,” said Isabel, riding up close to examine it. She liked to linger there because it was a memorial to Edward’s mother, and because for her it would always be a symbol of the ideally happy marriage of her dreams. But, being Isabel the Fair, she had to improve the occasion with a little mild coquetry. “It is a lovely thing,” she said, reaching out a small gloved hand to touch the stone and glancing sideways at her enamoured escort. “Fit to express a man’s undying love for a woman, do you not think?”
For a Master-of-Horse le Messager seemed to be having a great deal of trouble with some buckle on his harness. “I would express mine in some warmer medium — heart’s blood, not stone,” she understood him to say.
In the courtyard he waved aside the grooms and lifted her down himself, and, inspired by the songbirds and the springtime, and partly, perhaps, by pique, because she had scarcely seen her husband all day, Isabel invited him into her private apartments to drink a cup of wine.
Before going to spend a few quiet moments in the Queen’s private chapel Bringnette had flung wide the window to let in the warm sunshine which her mistress loved; but it was no fault of hers that two gardeners were talking carelessly down in the rose garden below. It was the sort of thing which was bound to happen sooner or later. Not expecting the riders back so soon, the good woman had left only Ghislaine in attendance; and Isabel, with an exclamation of pleasure, had crossed the room immediately, wine goblet in hand, to enjoy the informal hour and the sunlit prospect. The homely thud of spades on earth reminded her how anxious Edward was to make her garden beautiful and although she could not see the men she guessed that he had sent them because they were specially clever with roses. Even her foreign ears could detect the difference in their voices, the one with the cockney twang of a regular Palace gardener, the other with an unfamiliar rustic burr. “Should be a fair sight cum zummertime,” he was saying. “An’ a place for the Queen to sit in, God bless’er! All they blooms we planted afore Christmas’ll just be at their best, I reckon, when her time comes to rest’ere, big with child.”
But the other man’s words struck her cold. “If she ever manages to get a child,” he said, with an angry sniff.
“Aw, cum now, Job. I do allow’er be but a tiddy little lass. But still, cum zummertime — ”
“It is neither her Grace’s stature nor her age that threatens fertility.”
There was a shocked kind of silence down among the rose bushes.
“You never mean to tell me the King be impotent? Lord save us, not the lusty Longshanks’ son!”
“It is easy to see you are up from the country, Jacques. It is not the King’s virility that is in question, but we all know that he’ll have little desire to spare for her with the cursed Gascon’s fine body at hand.”
Isabel stood motionless, the red wine slowly spilling down the folds of her riding habit. Her young, unlined face seemed to grow sharp and old with understanding. Her golden-brown eyes were full of hurt and horror.
Too late, Robert had created a noisy diversion with an overturned stool. Too late, Ghislaine had moved in front of her and slammed the casement shut. With its closing, an unhappy silence hung in the room, so lately filled with the glad scents and sounds of spring. “Only this morning I was so young — so ridiculously young and unthinking!” The words formed themselves somewhere within the lonely waste of Isabel’s consciousness, but no sound came. She recalled with new understanding the strange tone in which the worldly-wise Countess in Boulogne had said, “Other women? Oh no, I never heard of any.” She was quite unaware of her companions. But she must speak aloud to someone — someone of her own whose judgments had no roots in this strange, disappointing land. Someone who could tell her if she had overheard aright, or — overhearing — rightly understood. Instinctively as a scalded child, she roused herself to find Marguerite. The empty goblet dropped from her hand as she turned, to shatter among the scented rushes on the floor.
Before Isabel could reach the door Robert le Messager had waylaid her, daring to grip her shoulders with both hands. “Parliament is not likely to fail in their insistence upon Gaveston’s exile,” he said. “But lest they should, though the King kills me for it, I will make sure that the Gascon goes.”
Outraged by his passionate sympathy, Isabel struck him and shook herself free. She could not bear that he should know — that men should talk of it. She could have sent Ghislaine to ask her aunt to come to her, but she had to get away from that room, from those who had shared the hearing of such l
ewd humiliation. She ran, light as thistledown, along the passages to the old part of the palace where the May Queen lived, and Marguerite rose instantly from her book at sight of her.
Isabel banged the heavy oak door behind her and sagged back against it, hugely relieved to find her aunt alone. “Is it true, what they say about Edward and Piers Gaveston?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, I see by your face! Of course it is true.” Coming further into the room, Isabel stormily answered her own question. “Anyone but a fool must have seen it. Everybody has always known, I suppose. Even the very gardeners. Everybody except innocents like me and poor Ghislaine. How right Edward was to treat me like a child!”
“How did you — come to realize?”
“I told you. Or did I? Two gardeners were talking. Just now, under my window. Even my Master-of-Horse had the impertinence to pity me.”
“You poor child!”
Isabel scarcely heard her. “You must have known,” she accused. “Why did you not tell me? At Boulogne, when I asked you about England?”
“What good would it have done?”
“I would not have come!” flared Isabel, almost hating her aunt’s still composure.
Wrung by the whiteness of her face, Marguerite pushed her gently into her own vacated chair. “My dear, you know that we women are only pawns in this game of politics. Your father is probably furious, having now heard what my other brothers — your uncles — have to report upon their return to Paris. But an alliance depends upon years of foreign policy, not upon individual morals or a bride’s happiness.”
“I could have appealed to the Dauphin — or to my favourite brother Charles who has always listened to me.”
“The most that either of them will do is to back the English barons in their determination to get Piers Gaveston out of the country.”
Isabel sat in silence for a while, reviewing her wrongs. “So however Edward blamed me, there really was nothing unreasonable about my jealousy,” she said slowly. “Many a woman is jealous of her husband’s friends, knowing full well that he still has need of her. But Edward has no need of me. When I am wild with happiness because he comes to my bed, for him it is just a duty. I have nothing — nothing — which Piers Gaveston cannot give him. ‘No desire left for her’ that wretched gardener dared to say!” Overwhelmed by a flood of bitterness, Isabel buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Marguerite, ma chere, to think that once I used to pity you!” she sobbed. “Just for going young to an upright, warlike man of sixty!”
“You had no cause to, I assure you.”
“He has certainly become a difficult legend to live up to!” agreed Isabel, borrowing some of her husband’s bitterness.
“Perhaps. But it is not only I who speak of him so. Consider those hard-bitten barons. When he died I saw many of them weep. And even those who did not love him feared him with respect. His memory remains with them, as a pattern and way of life for this country. They are bewildered and disappointed because they have not the same guidance from his son. Isabel, you must not form a picture of England’s finest Plantagenet King from the twisted things young Edward says of him.”
Isabel had got a hold on herself and sat up very straight in the high-backed chair. “Yet you are fond of — young Edward, as you call him?” In spite of her disillusionment — or perhaps because of it — the words were almost a plea.
“I have always found it easy to love him, Isabel, because of a certain sweetness in his disposition. For all his insolence and frivolity, he would never willingly be unkind. See how he inspired love in you. And those of us whom he loves, he loves with singular loyalty. His tragedy is that he was born heir to a throne. I always think he would have made such an admirable lord of the manor, getting on well with his neighbours and knowledgeably farming his land!”
“And Gaveston?” asked Isabel, after a pause.
Marguerite rose with a sigh and moved back to the desk where her book still lay open “Even Gaveston I do not find all bad. I have known him since he was a lad. I am perhaps the only one towards whom his teasing is softened by tenderness. I have even gone so far as to wonder at times whether there is anything about me which could possibly remind him of his mother.”
“Is it to her that he sends so much of Edward’s money?” asked Isabel harshly. “Milord Pembroke was saying only the other day that half my dowry has gone to Gascony.”
“His mother died years ago, I believe. He never speaks of her. But there is no doubt that he spends money like water, that most of it comes through the royal Exchequer and that a good deal of it goes to his Guienne estates and his impoverished relatives.”
Isabel gathered herself up wearily from her aunt’s chair. She felt far more exhausted than the morning’s canter warranted. “I used to think that the barons were too harsh, and was often sorry for Edward. But now I shall pray nightly that they exile his — minion — for life.” Halfway to the door she stopped, remembering something else she had wondered about. “Why was he sent away before? Was it because of this same thing?”
“Yes. And their senseless extravagances. When his father came home from Scotland, he had more time to look into his son’s household accounts and to hear how things were. He ordered them not to see each other, but it seemed that so long as they were in the same country nothing could keep them apart. Edward begged me to intercede with his father to let him keep Gaveston — ask ‘in the most conciliatory manner you are able’, he wrote, with good reason. I did what I could, but the two of them broke into the Bishop of Chester’s park and then asked that good old soldier, Hugh le Despenser, who was leading an army up to the border, to excuse them because they preferred to tilt at a tournament. After that the King was adamant. And then Edward must needs enrage the King still further by asking him to give Piers Guienne. He must have been mad, I think.”
“He never does understand very well about other people’s feelings. What did my father-in-law do?”
“Flew into one of the famous Plantagenet rages. I do not suppose you will ever have to encounter one with his son. Perhaps it is as well that that terrible family inheritance seems to have been left out of him.”
“I would sooner he had it. I would not mind if he beat me — so long as he were strong and passionate!” cried Isabel, with closed eyes and clenched hands. “You do not know how humiliating it is to have a husband who is never stirred to be anything more than — kind and gentle.”
“It could have its advantages,” pointed out Marguerite drily. “They say that mine shook yours so violently on that unfortunate occasion that he tore out a lock of his perfumed hair! And then had the guards put him out of the room.” She crossed the room and kissed the overwrought girl with real kindness. “Take comfort, dear Isabel, for Lancaster and Warwick and the rest are sure to get their way, and life here at court should be very different after Gaveston is gone.”
“Yes. Edward will sulk and mope all the time,” said Isabel unresponsively.
“Oh, come, pull your resources together. There is one thing Gaveston cannot give him. Perhaps if you were to bear Edward a son — ”
Isabel turned like an angry cat, one hand already on the door latch. “You say that! And you a Capet!” she cried. “Of a truth this pernicious country must have worn away your pride. You do not suppose that, with my foolishness at last informed, I will ever again have him in my bed?”
“But no man would endure that.”
“No man!” agreed Isabel bitterly.
Marguerite hid a smile for her untried arrogance. “I do not think you are the type of which nuns are made, with their lifelong vows of chastity. You would be very lonely, would you not, in your big empty bed? And the nights, when one is lonely, can seem very long.”
Isabel resented her rallying tone. In her hurt pride she found her thoughts straying to Robert le Messager, remembering how recklessly he had held her. He would always be there. Edward had appointed him to her household, just as Gaveston had been appointed to his own. There could be a kind of r
etributive justice about it.
“I did not say my bed need be empty,” she said, appreciating the swift look of alarm that crossed her aunt’s austerely lovely face. And with dramatic effect she made that her parting shot, being neither entirely serious about Robert nor in any mood for listening to a warning about discretion in high places.
Chapter Six
Fanned to yet further discontent by a second grievance, which in happier circumstances she would have accepted for love’s sake, Isabel began to complain to her kinsman Lancaster about the financial difficulties reported by the Comptroller of her Household. And in spite of Edward’s charmingly worded orders that “his dearest consort should be honourably provided with all things necessary” the discomforted Earl had to confess that the Treasury was far too depleted to provide for her as befitted her birth and rank.
Even that part of her aunt’s dowry which had been allotted to her by her parents was not forthcoming, and it was certainly not Marguerite who had had the spending of it.
“The King himself is in sore straits about money,” admitted his treasurer, Sir Walter Reynolds, when summoned by Lancaster to a family consultation in the Queen-Dowager’s apartments.
“Whatever the cause, your penury, my dear Isabel, shall be brought up and carefully considered when this long-overdue Parliament meets,” her uncle of Lancaster promised her.
“And how do you suppose the voting will go, Thomas, for your motion to expel Piers Gaveston from the country?” asked Marguerite.
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